In recent years, environment-related situations have developed serious problems such as an environmental pollution and a global warming. In the automotive sectors, the reduction of emission gas including carbon dioxide is a matter of growing concern.
Further, safety issues are considered to have importance under the current situation of traffic accidents and the like.
One approach to the above problems is that the vehicle is equipped with more intelligent and sophisticated functions intended to improve the current standard of environment-friendly and safer performance of the vehicle. This approach has been implemented after the awareness to those problems and concerns, and has yielded a certain outcome.
The other approach to the above problems is that the drivers are trained to have improved efficiency in terms of driving the vehicle on a lower fuel consumption rate, with improved safety-related driving skills. Japanese patent documents JP-A-2000-247162 and JP-A-2002-319087 disclose a technique that evaluates/diagnoses the driving condition for providing an advice for the driver of the vehicle.
More specifically, the driving condition evaluation apparatus for the vehicle disclosed in the former patent document evaluates multiple diagnosis items of driving condition by detecting the driving condition and comparing the detected condition value with a reference value. The driving characteristics diagnosis method disclosed in the latter document is that, by collecting vehicle condition information with a control unit on the vehicle, the collected information is diagnosed at an information center after the information is transmitted thereto, and the diagnosis result is then returned to the vehicle side.
However, the apparatus in the former patent document does not consider the priority of the advice provision, that is, on which diagnosis item an advice should be provided, and does not consider at what point of time the advice should be provided.
Further, the technique in the latter patent document accumulates a certain amount of vehicle condition information before transmitting the information to the information center. Therefore, realtime feedback of an advice for the driver is difficult.
Due to the above-described operation scheme, the contents of the provided advice and/or the advice provision timing may not necessarily be appropriate, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of the provided advice.